Suìhuá jìlì 歲華紀麗
A Splendid Record of the Year’s Bloom by 韓鄂 (Hán È, late Táng / Wǔdài, zhuàn 撰)
About the work
A four-juan parallel-prose almanac of seasonal allusions and ritual lore in lìjù 儷句 (parallel-couplet) form, organised by the four seasons and then by the twelve months and the principal festivals — Spring (新年, 人日, 上元, 中和, 社日, 上巳, 寒食); Summer (四月八日, 端午, 伏日, plus rubrics for heat, drought, wind, rain); Autumn (七夕, 中元, 重陽, with subheadings for dew, frost, moon, eclipses); Winter (冬至, snow, ice, ice-storing, 臘 sacrifice, nuó exorcism, year’s-end). Each topic is opened by a four- or six-character parallel tag and followed by short quotations from classics, dynastic histories, zhìguài, and Táng verse. In genre and intent it sits between Yú Shìnán’s Běitáng shūchāo 北堂書鈔 (KR3k0004) and Bái Jūyì’s Báishì liùtiē: a parallel-prose composition manual organised as a seasonal table of pre-cooked allusions, intended for use in biànwén 駢文 production and in fielding shíling 時令 topics on the jìnshì examination. The work belongs to the same author-family as Hán È’s better-known agricultural manual Sìshí zuǎnyào 四時纂要 and shares its underlying four-season frame.
Tiyao
(Translated from the Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào, 子部四十七 類書類存目一, recension at the Kyoto University Zinbun digital text 0282801. The work appears in the Sìkù catalogue only as a cúnmù (listed but not printed) entry, and the KRP digital text carries no tíyào of its own.)
The received text is signed “compiled by Hán È of the Táng.” Examination of the Tángshū “Zǎixiàng shìxì biǎo” shows that one Hán Qiàn 韓倩, Diànzhōngchéng (Director of the Palace), was a younger brother of Hán Xiū 韓休; Qiàn’s son Hán Dí 韓滌 was Hénán bīngcáo cānjūn, and Hán È was Dí’s great-grandson. The book arranges things by the four seasons and the festivals (jiéhòu 節候), assigning each to a topical heading and casting them in parallel couplets — roughly in the manner of the Běitáng shūchāo and the Liùtiē. The Táng and Sòng bibliographies both list it, and Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí also records it. But no copy circulated for a long time. The present recension was cut by Hú Zhènhēng 胡震亨 in his Bìcè hán 秘册函; Máo Jìn 毛晉 acquired the broken boards and included them in his Jīndài bìshū 津逮秘書. Hú Zhènhēng’s colophon claims he obtained the text from the family of Zhèng Xiǎo 鄭曉. Wáng Shìzhēn’s Jūyì lù 居易錄 takes it to be Hú’s own forgery. Now Qián Zēng’s Dúshū mǐnqiú jì 讀書敏求記 reports: an old manuscript copy of Suìhuá jìlì has several lines of missing characters at the end of the last juan and is missing its final leaf; later he saw a Sòng-blockprint copy in the collection of Lǐ Zhōnglù 李中麓 (i.e. Lǐ Kāixiān 李開先) of Zhāngqiū, and the lacunae were identical — so this book truly derives from a Sòng original and is not Hú Zhènhēng’s confection. However, the Shūlù jiětí describes the work as “drawing materials from the Classics, the Histories, the Masters, and the Biographies relating to seasonal matters, with parallel couplets interspersed among them”; this received text on the other hand is entirely in parallel couplets, which already does not match. The couplets are moreover exceedingly coarse and clumsy. Only some scores of source-works are quoted, and these are stitched together piecemeal, often not forming a coherent sentence. Further: the Dùyáng zábiān 杜陽雜編 was written by Sū È 蘇鶚, who took the jìnshì under Xīzōng’s Guāngqǐ reign-period (885–888), already at the very end of the Táng; the Zhìyán 摭言 was written by Wáng Dìngbǎo 王定保, jìnshì of Zhāozōng’s Guānghuà 3 (900), already in the Five Dynasties — how could Hán È quote books by either of these men? At one point the text also cites the Sìshí zuǎnyào 四時纂要; checking the Tángshū bibliography, this book is itself by Hán È — so how would Hán È quote his own work? Moreover, Hán È being a Táng man, he ought not call the Xuánzōng “the Táng Xuánzōng” or refer in the third person to “the Táng era” — all of which is suspect. Qián Zēng’s defence is therefore not a definitive verdict.
Abstract
The Suìhuá jìlì is conventionally catalogued as a late-Táng work but most plausibly dates from the very last decades of the Táng or from the early Wǔdài (c. 880–960). The dating problem is the same one the Sìkù compilers raise: the work is signed by a Hán È who, if he is the Hán È the Xīn Tángshū “Zǎixiàng shìxì biǎo” places four generations below Hán Xiū’s brother Hán Qiàn, would need to be writing right at the dynasty’s close — and indeed it quotes Sū È’s Dùyáng zábiān and Wáng Dìngbǎo’s Zhìyán, both of which post-date 885 and 900 respectively. The Sìkù compilers read this as evidence of Míng forgery; modern scholarship (Miáo Qǐyù in the introduction to his Sìshí zuǎnyào jiàoshì, and Wáng Sānqìng 王三慶 in his 2007 study) reads the same data as evidence that Hán È was writing in the early Wǔdài and looking back at the Táng. On this reading the Suìhuá jìlì is genuinely a Hán È text composed c. 900–940; the cross-citation of the Sìshí zuǎnyào is then a Wǔdài author quoting his own earlier book, while “the Táng Xuánzōng” / “the Táng era” formulations are not anachronisms at all but a Wǔdài hand looking back at the previous dynasty. Qián Zēng’s identification of a Sòng-blockprint copy in the Lǐ Zhōnglù 李中麓 collection (Zhāngqiū, Míng) with the same final-leaf lacuna as Hú Zhènhēng’s recovery settles the question of post-Sòng transmission decisively in favour of authenticity at the latest by the Sòng. The preface preserved at the head of the received text is signed only “謹序” (without date or compiler’s name) and ends “覩昌黎韓公著《歲華紀麗》者擷奧典之雅言…” — speaking of Hán È in the third person — so it is not the author’s own preface but a Sòng or later prefacer’s hand. The text was lost in China proper by the late Míng (it is not in the Sòng catalogues’ main body but only in their cúnmù lists) and was reconstituted by Hú Zhènhēng in his Bìcè hán; after Hú’s blocks broke up, Máo Jìn salvaged what survived and reissued them in the Jīndài bìshū. The KRP digital text is descended from this Jīndài bìshū lineage (transmitted via the Zhōnghuá zàizào shànběn 中華再造善本 typesetting series, hence the krp-titles @CH7x2011 source id).
Translations and research
- Miáo Qǐyù 繆啟愉 (ed.). Sìshí zuǎnyào jiàoshì 四時纂要校釋. Beijing: Nóngyè chū-bǎn-shè, 1981. [Critical edition of Hán È’s sister-work; its introduction sets out the genealogical evidence locating Hán È in the late-Táng / early-Wǔdài and is the standard modern reference for the author.]
- Wáng Sān-qìng 王三慶. “Hán È Suì-huá jì-lì yán-jiū” 韓鄂《歲華紀麗》研究. Chéng-gōng dà-xué Zhōng-wén xué-bào 成功大學中文學報 19 (2007): 1–32. [Topical study of the work itself; surveys transmission and parallel-prose vocabulary.]
- Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A New Manual (6th ed.). Harvard University Asia Center, 2022. §35.4.4 (Wǔdài–Sòng agronomy) and §72.1 (leishu) treat Hán È’s two works together.
- Donald Holzman, “The Cold Food Festival in Early Medieval China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46.1 (1986): 51–79. [Uses the Suìhuá jìlì among the secondary witnesses to Táng festival practice.]
- Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要 (1782), 子部四十七 類書類存目一, entry “Suìhuá jìlì 歲華紀麗 四卷.”
Other points of interest
The work is one of a small handful of premodern suìshí compendia (alongside Zōng Lǐn’s 宗懍 lost JīngChǔ suìshí jì 荊楚歲時記, transmitted in fragments, and Chén Yuánjìng’s 陳元靚 Sòng-period Suìshí guǎngjì 歲時廣記) that anchor what we know of Táng festival practice. Hú Zhènhēng’s late-Míng recovery is itself a notable case-study in early-modern philological reconstruction of lost Táng texts, paralleling his and Máo Jìn’s work on the Táng fùyùn (rhyme-fu) collections.